The latest installment of the very entertaining Trapped in a Scattergram by the good folks at Tifo focused on the goalscoring exploits of young strikers under the age of 23.
For those unaware of the premise of the feature, the host JJ Bull has imprisoned a data analyst who works at The Athletic within the confines of a graphical represenetation of some football data, and JJ demands that he (Mark Carey in this case) do his bidding; much like Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs.
In the most recent video Mark presents a comparison of non-penalty goals per 90 mins against non-penalty expected goals (xG) per 90 mins. The data used are a combination of last season and the current season so far (i.e. all of 2020-21 season and first half of 2021-22 season). Non-penalty xG per 90 measures how frequently a players finds themselves in good goalscoring positions in open play; and its relationship to non-penalty goals per 90 gives an indication of a player’s ability to convert those opportunities.
One of the comments on the youtube video asked about having an interactive version of the graph. That made me think that this would be a good opportunity for me to sharpen my Plotly skills, so I decided to make the graphic below!
As well as being interactive, in terms of scrolling over dots to see names and ability to zoom by clicking and dragging (double-click to zoom back out), I decided to add a dropdown menu that allows the user to switch between any of the last 5 seasons in the top 5 major European leagues. I used a different qualifying criteria to Mark used in the video, also aged 23 or under but with a minimum of 810 minutes played. This was done purely so that I could shoehorn Eddie Nketiah into my graphs…..
When viewing multiple seasons it’s hard not to agree with JJ’s assessment of Erling Håland and Kylian Mbappé as ” the most confident human boys”, which holds true over multiple seasons. It is amazing to see how much they have achieved in their short careers and exciting to wonder what the future holds for them.
Also interesting to see Timo Werner’s position on the 2019-20 season graph during his final year at Leipzig. If he could rediscover just a fraction of that finishing ability, it would give Chelsea’s faltering title challenge a massive boost.
I do not own any of the data presented here. Data was collected from the fbref website and generated by StatsBomb.
Produced by Aimsir Spóirt
(generated using R Markdown)
